The explosion of available information on the web coupled with the ever increasing mechanisms to interact is driving the need for a more effective, efficient, relevant and natural interface to support access to information, applications and people as well as facilitate people-to-people and people-to-information interactions. Users of the web today are suffering from constant partial attention where their attentiveness is constantly divided amongst an overabundance of information sources. The net result of this information overload is loss of opportunity, loss of focus and a poverty of attention in general.
With the explosion of new knowledge and information on the web, the half life of these entities decreases. This presents challenges in how to deliver online services and value propositions to the end user at an ever increasing quality, speed and relevance. The ability to smartly focus a user's attention, conversation, interaction and collaboration habits ultimately work towards securing a better “return on attention” for the user.
Today's systems lack an ability to condition and rank immense corpuses of online information based on a relevancy weighting that is unique to each individual user and therefore a user typically enjoys a lower personalised return on attention impacting on a user's efficiency and effectiveness in completing any online tasks.
Furthermore, with the explosion of new knowledge and information on the web, in the cloud, within corporate environments and accessible to the user from within their own computing devices, there is an increased opportunity for intelligent systems to create new knowledge.
Conventional mechanisms for focusing a user's attention, providing relevance and supporting intelligent collaboration, interaction and knowledge discovery/search are suffering from a variety of deficiencies.